Pearl (2022)
A girl stuck on her family farm dreams of escaping into a life of stardom.
Laura’s Rating: 1.5/5 Stars
Plot: With her husband away at war, Pearl is forced to live at home and tend to her ailing father under the watch of her strict mother. She longs for success, stardom, and a life away from home.
Analysis: Pearl is a prequel to X (2022), but in my opinion, it’s a rather unnecessary origin story. Pearl is a messed up girl, but you get that sense early on and the later events of the film didn’t shock me or pack a punch, nor did they add much to the background of X.
The acting was good, but the plot felt basic. Many of the unsettling scenes bordered on campy, but that either wasn’t intentional or shouldn’t have been. The ode to old Technicolor and the references to Wizard of Oz were an interesting concept in a horror movie, but they didn’t do much for me. I did think it was clever to set the film in 1918, during the Spanish Flu outbreak, seeing as the movie came out at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The donning of masks, fear of germs, and effects of isolation were all highlighted, but I think the film could have done more with those themes.
There was some unnecessary graphic violence, but it is a horror movie so that may just be my take and not how other viewers would feel. I thought X was decent, but Pearl felt unnecessary to me and you could skip it.
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